ART / ARCHITECTURE; A Painter and Her Patron: Two Modern Women

VISITORS to the women's pavilion at the 1893 world's fair in Chicago winced at the huge mural of cavorting women and naked babies emblazoned atop a high wall. The canvas, 58 feet long by 14 feet tall, by an obscure Philadelphia spinster named Mary Cassatt, was drenched in vivid color and light, a new ''impressionist'' style few Victorian Americans had seen. It was a ''singular failure,'' one critic wrote.

But to Bertha Palmer, the Chicago socialite who had commissioned the work, Cassatt's painting was ''the most beautiful thing that has been done'' for the fair -- ''simple, strong, and sincere, so modern.''

On the last point, at least, Palmer was right. Cassatt was in the vanguard of the new, and also destined for fame. Within decades she would become one of America's most popular artists, especially admired for her mother-and-child portraits, which are endlessly reproduced today on greeting cards and calendars.

Less has been known about her patron. But a new exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, ''A Modern Woman: Mary Cassatt,'' may change that; the show, which travels to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in February and then to the National Gallery of Art in Washington in June, offers not only a solid overview of Cassatt's work, the first Cassatt retrospective in 30 years, but also a window on the intriguing character of Bertha Palmer, one of the earliest champions of Impressionists in the United States.

The wife of a business titan, Potter Palmer, Bertha Palmer was remarkably farsighted as she went about amassing a distinguished art collection. The works she gave to the Art Institute, including several Cassatts on view in the current exhibition, form the core of the museum's Impressionist collection, a legacy comparable to Louisine Elder Havemeyer's contribution to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, says Judith A. Barter, the Art Institute's curator of American arts.

Palmer started collecting Cassatt soon after the art agent Sarah Tyson Hallowell introduced her to the artist in Paris in 1889. Cassatt and Palmer were immediately drawn together. Both were from rich, mercantile families. Both were devoted to women's rights, and both were passionate about modern art. Yet there were vast differences in their life styles. The prim, Philadelphia-bred Cassatt lived quietly with her aged parents in an apartment in Paris and a country estate at Bachivillers in northern France. She was apparently never interested in marrying, and as one friend remarked, she ''would have lived much the same life had she never painted or left Philadelphia.''

Palmer, on the other hand, used her position as a rich man's wife to reach the top of American society. She was born in Louisville, Ky., in 1849, four years after Cassatt, the eldest of three daughters of Henry Hamilton Honore, a hardware merchant whose ancestors were French. Attracted by stories of the fortunes being made in the West, Honore moved his family to Chicago in 1855, when Bertha was 6. One day, when his bright, charming, dark-haired daughter was 13, Honore introduced her to a 36-year-old bachelor tycoon named Potter Palmer, who had made a fortune in real estate and a fashionable dry goods store that he later sold to Marshall Field. Palmer immediately became smitten with the girl, and, as he later told his eldest son, decided to someday marry her.

Bertha grew up to be brilliant and ambitious and legendarily beautiful. When she finally married Palmer, in 1870, he was 44 and she was 21. Gossips sniped that the marriage was a business transaction -- that Honore, who was deeply in debt, had virtually sold his daughter to Palmer to help the family financially. But the union turned out to be solid and fulfilling for both partners. Bertha loved being rich and used her money not only to build a dazzling art collection but also to promote progressive causes, from women's rights to labor unions to Jane Addams's settlement house, Hull House.

With her buttery Southern voice, petite, opulently clothed figure and thick curls framing a pretty face, Palmer seemed the essence of Victorian femininity. Yet her romantic looks belied a cool pragmatism. A friend recalled, ''I once heard her comment upon the unforgivable folly of the marriage of a beautiful friend to a man without a fortune as if it belonged to the category of moral delinquency.'' Few men were as rich as her own husband. In 1882, Potter Palmer built the largest house in Chicago, a crenelated castle on Lake Shore Drive, where Bertha entertained lavishly and set the social standard in Chicago for decades.

Her art collection was vital to that success. At a time when women had virtually no status in public life, ''being a patroness was a viable, socially acceptable way for affluent women to have power,'' says Anne Higonnet, a writer and professor of art history at Wellesley College. To attract sophisticated art admirers, it wasn't sufficient to buy only Old Masters; one had to collect the newest art.

BUT Palmer bought with an avidity that suggested more than social ambition. She had a deep ''visceral connection to the art,'' Professor Higonnet says. ''Impressionism, after all, was the visual expression of new cultural forces,'' an opening up of society that offered greater opportunities for women.

Cassatt helped guide Palmer's purchases. The artist, in fact, shaped the taste of many important women who collected art, among them Louisine Elder Havemeyer, who with her husband, H. O. Havemeyer, owned 500 Impressionist works, and Theodate Pope, one of the first women in America to become an architect; her collection has been preserved at the Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, Conn. It was at Cassatt's suggestion that Palmer bought her first Impressionist piece, ''On the Stage,'' a pastel of dancing ballerinas by Edgar Degas, for which she paid $500 in 1889. It was the beginning of a five-year buying spree. She soon added works by Degas, Monet, Manet, Pissarro, Sisley, Renoir and Delacroix as well as Cassatt to her collection.

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Palmer wanted to fill up her gallery at home in time for the Chicago world's fair, the World Columbian Exposition, which was to celebrate, one year late, the 400th anniversary of Columbus's discovery of America. Fair officials had named Palmer head of the Board of Lady Managers, a group of 115 women -- lawyers, artists, writers, community leaders and wives of prominent men -- who were charged with organizing a women's pavilion, an immense building meant to showcase the talents of women designers, scientists, writers, artists and architects.

Suffragists like Susan B. Anthony thought Palmer a frivolous socialite with no talent for public affairs and opposed her appointment. But Palmer turned out to be an effective executive. From her office in the Rand-McNally Building in downtown Chicago, she worked long hours, sending out letters to gather information on the status of women throughout the world, from New York to Siam. She pressured the National Columbian Commission to include women on the committee that governed the Exposition and successfully lobbied Illinois legislators for an $80,000 appropriation. In Washington, where she had White House connections through her sister Ida, who was married to Ulysses S. Grant's son, she dazzled Senator J. W. Candler, chairman of the world's fair committee, and his fellow senators with her eloquence and charm. When questioned by Daniel Burnham, chief of construction for the fair, about her wish to have a woman design the pavilion, ''she whipped out a silver pencil and rapidly sketched the interior arrangement'' of the proposed building, noted her biographer, Ishbel Ross.

Palmer hired Sophia Hayden, the first woman to graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to design the women's pavilion. She also organized elaborate exhibits incorporating a library of books by and about women and a model kitchen, featuring the world's first gas oven. For women and children visiting the fair, she provided an inexpensive dormitory and day-care center.

Palmer had the idea of decorating the women's pavilion with two enormous murals that would face each other from the end walls of a giant foyer. One mural, called ''Primitive Woman,'' would be painted by the American artist Mary MacMonnies, the wife of the sculptor Frederick MacMonnies, and would show the traditional role of a woman as the helpmate of a man. The other mural, ''Modern Woman,'' would depict the late 19th century's opportunities for women in education and the workplace. Palmer's first choice for the second mural, the American painter Elizabeth Gardner, turned the project down, fearing it would be too time consuming and exhausting. Palmer then approached Cassatt.

Cassatt, who at the time was virtually unknown outside France, saw the project as a chance to build an American audience. Cassatt moved to her family's country home and worked nonstop on the mural for almost a year. She had a large glass studio built on her lawn and a 60-foot-long, 6-foot-deep trench dug so that she could lower the canvas and paint the top part without using ladders.

CASSATT rejected a literal interpretation of ''modern woman'' that might have shown college and factory scenes. Instead she chose a symbolic rendering of the theme, showing figures picking fruit in a light-filled garden, scenes meant to represent women plucking ideas from the tree of knowledge.

The Chicago audience viewing the work reacted with hostility, however, regarding it as a blur of lurid colors and confused images. When the fair closed, Palmer put the mural in storage and never saw it again. It has since disappeared.

Cassatt was convinced that sexism had been behind the negative reaction. ''After all, give me France,'' she told the agent Sarah Hallowell in a letter. ''Women do not have to fight for recognition here if they do serious work. I suppose it is Mrs. Palmer's French blood which gives her organizing powers and her determination that women should be someone and not something.''

Ironically, Cassatt's Chicago failure led to her first major Parisian success: an exhibition organized by the influential French dealer Charles Durand-Ruel showing 100 paintings that Cassatt had based on the mural. Each canvas used the mural's models, clothes, settings, colors and themes. They were among the strongest and most beautiful works Cassatt had painted.

Though Bertha Palmer and Mary Cassatt lived into the first quarter of the 20th century, neither woman embraced the next wave of modern art, Cubism. In the early 1920's, a friend took Cassatt to Gertrude Stein's Paris apartment on the Rue de Fleurus, where Stein presided over a modernist salon. Her walls were covered with works by the hottest new painters -- Picasso, Braque, Miro and Cezanne. Cassatt was appalled. ''I have never in my life seen so many dreadful paintings in one place, and I have never seen so many dreadful people gathered together,'' her friend recalled her complaining. ''I want to be taken home at once.''

By the turn of the century, Palmer had stopped collecting art. After her husband died, in 1902, she moved to Sarasota, Fla., where she took up fruit farming with the same passion she had once lavished on Impressionism. She died of breast cancer in 1918 at the age of 69. Her collection of approximately 70 Impressionist works, valued in 1922 at $2.5 million, went to the Art Institute. Over the years, the reputation of most of these works, not to mention their value, has soared; in the case of Cassatt, notes Professor Higonnet, ''it has never been higher.'' Palmer's choices, made quickly in a short time, she adds, ''turned out to be tremendously smart.''